Day 1 (traveling) Day 2 (The Conference)

By: Bryant Jaquez ( @bryantjaquez )

This is the beginning of my 1 week journal. I am going to be journaling my journey from Redding California to New York, New York! Why is Bryant going to New York? Good Question. It all started last week when I won a competition from one of the best SEO companies in the world, Distilled. If you want to ask me any questions about this trip, just tweet me @bryantjaquez with the hash-tag #bryantinNYC

DISTILLED hosted a competition which challenged some of the brightest SEO minds in the world to submit stories about how they use SEO in a startup company. Obviously, as you might have guessed, I won. Well, actually I tied for first place. The other winner was the SEO team from Seat Geek.

My prize for winning was a ticket to the SEARCH LOVE CONFERENCE in New York City. As someone who is fairly new to the inbound marketing industry, I was both surprised and delighted to win. So before I start, I have to thank a few people who are also responsible for this victory. My wife is graciously supporting me, even though a last-minute trip to New York is slightly out of our budget… she is amazing, so she is excited to let me go! Aaron Patterson is one the marketing team with me at NERDS ON CALL.  A lot of the award-winning marketing strategies we use were his ideas, so I literally would NOT be going if it were not for him;  and obviously, I am thrilled that DISTILLED  hosted this competition and picked me as one of the winners.

So what will I be doing?

The Conference:  This is one of the best SEO conferences in the world. It will have the best that the inbound marketing world has to offer! Some of my heros will be there, including Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz, Will Critchlow from Diistilled, and Will Reynolds from Seer Interactive. Here is a link to the conference schedule.I will be attending sessions like:

• 9.10am-9.55am: “The modern SEO’s toolkit”
• Speaker: Will Critchlow – Distilled
• Description: To be truly effective as an SEO in 2011, Will argues that you need to be able to mash tools together, build your own “hack-tools” and prototype more complex tools for others to build. Are you comfortable making your computer do the work for you? Will’s going to show you how to multiply your effectiveness and get comfortable with large data-sets.

The Hotel: I will be staying at the Radisson Lexington Hotel! I’ve never stayed here before, but I’ve heard nice things about it. I’ll let you guys know what I think about the hotel once I get there.

What Will I Be Journaling?

I will be talking about two primary things:

#1 The Traveling: I have never been to NYC before, so I will try to keep this blog updated with reviews, food, of course, COFFEE, and the hotel.

#2 The Conference:  I am going to be blogging about the conference and anything really “memorable” that happens. Do not worry, DISTILLED team, I am  not going to give away any gems for free;  hopefully, I will even help “spread the word” about your conference and get more people to buy the DVD set!   I will blog some basic overviews of the SEO topics about which I am learning.

Stay tuned for more pictures…. and stories.  New York City, here I come!
 

Sacramento International Airport

The seats here have power outlets and cup holders!

I’m in Sacramento now. I’m about to board my flight to New York. The airport here is actually really nice. The seats all have cup holders, and power supplies. Watch out San Francisco, I might start doing all of my flying out of Sacramento!  I can’t help but wonder if anyone else in Sacramento is going to the same conference… If there are any Sacramento/San Francisco SEOs who are traveling to Search Love, leave me a comment. I would love to get to know some more northern California SEOs.

I should be in New York around 11pm. I estimate that will be about 3 cups of coffee. 
 
 
 

Denver Airport… For The Birds?

If I see one of those birds sneeze, I'm going to flip a lid.

Ok I’m actually not dogging Denver International Airport, it’s just that this airport is literally filed with birds.

I have a short layover here in Denver, so I thought I would log on and check in with you guys (all 10 of you.) I’m not going to say anything overtly derogatory about Denver’s airport because if I do I’ll loose one of my readers… Hi Aaron! So I’ll just “note” that the seats in SAC were more comfortable, the coffee that I got at LavAzza was Awful, and there aren’t any power outlets near the chairs. What do they expect me to do if my laptop dies, go sit next to the bathroom on the FLOOR? ( I realize that I sound like I’m writing an intro to WhiteWine.com ). My official ratting for the Denver International Airport is a B-.

Anyway. I’m only going to be here for 2 more hours so I’l be fine, and If I get board I’ll go play with the birds.

Day 2

Day 1: Search Love Conference

Well after 24 hours of traveling, and less then 5 hours of sleep…. I’m finally here! The conference is getting ready to start, so I’ll make sure to keep you guys updated with interesting snippets throughout the day. BTW, the conference room is AMAZING!! The Distilled team did an awesome job at putting this together.

The first speaker will be Will Critchlow… “SEO is just marketing: Marketing With Computers.” Basically, the only way I can sum up Will’s talk is to say: SEOs need to learn how to do basic “tasks” with code. If your job is dependent on making machines do what you want them to do… you need to learn how to speak their (machine) language.

Mat Clayton

Matt talked a lot about Facebook, and he shared stuff I’ve never even thought about before. We’ve all heard that Facebook has 700 million users, but if you put that into context, we need to realize that Facebook has 10% of the entire world on it’s database, and Facebook tracks it’s users everywhere they go.

Facebook is going to start leaning towards an “individualized” “identity” focused model. Mat shared about how to use the data that Facebook gives you (facepile, timeline, recommendations) to increase the conversion rates on your own site.

Tip: use something like Facepile next to a product on your website and you should see an instant dramatic increase in CTR, and interaction with that product.

Rand Fishkin

I’m going to try NOT to look like an omg cat. But I’m kind of a Rand fan… I’ll update you guys after his talk.

Rand started off by demonstrating one of the greatest benefits os SEO. He said, “An average TV AD campaign cost about 150,000 to produce and about 350,000 to run 1 time nationally. How much do billboards cost? how much does it cost to higher a celebrity to do Brad Endorsement?”

Traditional Advertising is extremely expensive. Can you imagine is us SEOs were given $500,000.00 for a one week SEO project?

Rand then spent most of his time talking about how valuable a “community” is. He said that he doen’t even have to build links anymore because as soon as someone on SEOmoz publishes an article it gets picked up by tons of people in the Moz community, and retweeted, re-posted, linked to, and promoted… FOR FREE!

If you invest the time and energy into building a passionate community that actually cares about what you do, they will do a lot for you.

David Minchala on Local SEO

David had a TON of golden information. I could easily write a whole blog post just on his local SEO tips. Basically, His main points were that Local SEO is a different beast then traditional organic SEO. Local SEO is influenced by different metrics, and some of the things that work for Organic SERPS just won’t work for Local.

One of the biggest challenges of Local SEO is that sometimes customers will interact with your brand on another website like, Yelp, or Open Table, and they might not ever visit your company’s website. You need to have systems in place to moniter where people are interacting with your brand.

Pro Tip: Local Citations (profiles on other sites such as citysearch or yelp) are like links. Get as many local citations as possible. Also, encourage your customers to review you, it will help ALOT.

Rob Miller on Infographics

People are tired of seeing bad infographics… If we keep producing crappy Infographics people are going to start thinking about them the way we think about the pop up “win an iPad” banners.

Rob’s basic message was, stop making bad inforgaphics! He talked a lot about doing interesting “data visualizations” like this… David McCandless

Interactive and personalized data visualizations is really the future of “infogrphics”, but first and formost Data Visualizations need to be useful, and beneficial. If they’re not beneficial why would anyone take the time to link to them?

I unfortunately ran into some technical difficulties with my laptop charger, You should continue reading Outspoken media’s blog at Tricks & Treats at SearchLove NYC